“Why bother with that shit?” Brenda asks, mouth full of turkey and pickles on rye. Kirby gives up on the calls and tears into his own sandwich.
“Because those sons of bitches on the city council are full of garbage. Municipality’s going under, inch by inch. County don’t give a shit. Mayor don’t even live here anymore. Someone has to do something.”
Brenda just laughs, but the sound is dismal. Joyless. “Do they?”
“They do,” Kirby replies, not sure he believes it, either, hoping it’s true.
Back in his dingy office that evening, surrounded by paperwork that predates him and equipment that doesn’t work, Kirby does get through. It’s a senator’s office, the Republican, he thinks, but possibly the Democrat. Their names sound the same and neither has done much for him. He’s so startled when a human being answers that he is speechless for a little too long. “Hi,” he finally says. “I’m one of your constituents. I live in Rudder and I’m the foreman of our electrical maintenance crew.”
“All right,” the voice says. A woman. Young. Tired. “And what can the senator’s office do for you?”
“Well, look, I’ve tried to address this locally, but we need help and the local government isn’t up to it. The municipality’s about to go bankrupt, but the county doesn’t give us any money because of the municipality, you know how it is, everyone chasing their own tail. I can’t do my job without personnel and equipment. My job is keeping the lights on, ma’am. Without my crew, this town is in the dark. I’m just trying to do my job.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He waits for her to offer some kind of solution, but the line just buzzes quietly; she has nothing to add.
“We need support. Financial support. New hires. Equipment. Every year we need more and every year we get less.”
“I will be happy to log your comment.”
“And?”
“That’s all I can really do at the moment, sir.”
“I mean, and then what?”
“Sorry?”
“So you log my comment and then what?”
“Well.” She heaves a sigh, long and deep. “You want the truth?”
He does and he doesn’t. “Yes.”
“Nothing. We’re working around the clock to organize relocation packages for Miamians, which…well, we’re doing our best. We’re trying to save cities, not towns. We just don’t have the resources. You want my personal opinion, I’d say it’s time to move.” Kirby stares at his office wall. There’s a calendar hanging from two years ago that he keeps forgetting to throw away. Through the slit of his blinds he can see Lucas and Brenda unloading gear from the bucket truck and hauling it into the open garage bay. “Thank you for calling Senator Joel Farrow’s office, and have a good day.” She hangs up. He wishes this exchange surprised him, but it doesn’t. Even knowing that all he’s doing is prolonging the inevitable, Kirby cannot bring himself to give up on Rudder. It isn’t self-important to believe that if he leaves, this town is done for. It’s just the way things are.
If the ocean is a body, then the Intracoastal Waterway is a body, too: skinny and twisty and tall. It tickles the ocean with its currents—freshwater greets salt in the bays, the sloughs, the deltas. It reaches: from the top of North America to the bottom, cupping the tip of Florida with its curving channels, wrapping around the Gulf and flowing west to Texas. But all bodies change. Even these.
Chapter 34
On her first day back since Hurricane Valerie, Wanda counts twelve kids, including herself. The fifth grade class grows ever smaller. A few more students disappear after every storm, taken north by parents who decided to make their evacuation permanent. The classroom is half-full. Other kids spread out, claiming two desks instead of one, littering the room with their backpacks and lunchboxes and binders, trying to make it seem less empty than it is. Wanda keeps her backpack between her knees, like always, and doesn’t unpack more than the book she’s using so that if she needs to, she can grab everything and go. She has never felt relaxed in this room—in any of the classrooms she’s occupied. The older she gets, the better she is at keeping her questions to herself. It’s hard for her not to raise her hand; there is so much she wants to know, but it’s better for her this way. If the other children forget she’s there, that’s a good thing.
At lunch, the sixth graders who accosted her by the Edge stare and whisper but do not talk to her. This is uncomfortable but better than the alternative. Even the possibility that they might approach, the fact that Corey’s pale blue eyes have found her at all among this thinning crowd of children, is enough to frighten her. She remembers his hand on her head, the salt water rushing up into her nostrils, down into her lungs. And the other thing—the thing she can’t describe. She still doesn’t know what that was.
After the final bell, Wanda gets on her bicycle and allows her jaw to unclench as soon as her tires hit the asphalt, feeling more and more herself the farther away from the school she gets. She isn’t looking forward to spending the rest of the afternoon at the blue house—Phyllis is old and boring, as far as Wanda can tell—but anything is better than school. She pedals slowly, trying to prolong her freedom.
When she reluctantly knocks, Phyllis answers the door with a pair of waders slung over her shoulder and a large tackle box in her hand. It isn’t at all what Wanda was expecting. Wanda stares at the waders—tall rubber boots that ascend and become trousers, knocking together where they dangle against Phyllis’s torso. She wears a green shirt with bleach stains all over it, and her mostly white hair is piled into a bun on top of her head that has gone lopsided. “I thought we could check on some things,” Phyllis says, and lets the screen door slam behind her.
“What kind of things?” Wanda asks, suspicious but also curious. It occurs to her now that, upon closer examination, she has no idea who this woman is. All she knows is that when her father encounters Phyllis in the grocery store, he gives her a solemn nod, and when they pass her on the road he lifts his hand from the steering wheel. This is Kirby’s way of saying hello without saying anything.
“Plants, mostly.”
“Check on…plants?”
“Dirt. Water. Sediment. Trees. That kind of thing.”
Wanda stares at the tackle box. She points. “What’s that, then?”
“For collecting specimens.”
“Of…”
“Plants and dirt and water.” Halfway down the porch steps, Phyllis stops and turns to Wanda. “We can do something else if you want,” she says.
“No,” Wanda replies quickly. “This is okay.” As it happens, checking on trees and dirt and water sounds like exactly the kind of thing she’d like to do. Her reticence forgotten, she accepts the piece of jerky Phyllis hands her as they walk to the salt-splattered Toyota, once dark blue, now a pale and uneven gray, parked in the shade of a cypress. “What kind?” Wanda asks, the jerky already in her mouth.
“Alligator,” Phyllis says.
“That’s the good kind.”